Frank Rubio, a former NASA astronaut, said goodbye to the solar panels and modules that made up his home for 371 days with a few wave gestures, a quick photo shoot, and handshakes. The longest single mission by an American to date came to an end in October 2023 when he left the International Space Station (ISS) and returned to Earth.
His stay in orbit was prolonged in March 2023 when the spacecraft he and his crewmates had been in eclipsed the previous US record of 355 continuous days.
Rubio was able to complete 5,963 orbits around the Earth, covering 157.4 million miles (253.3 million km), thanks to the additional months he spent in space.
Still, he was around two months short of the record for the longest human spaceflight ever—Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov, who spent 437 days aboard the Mir Space Station in the middle of the 1990s, holds that record.
Additionally, after spending 374 days in orbit, two Russian cosmonauts, Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub, surpassed the record for the longest stay on the International Space Station in September 2024. They left the International Space Station (ISS) on the same Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft as US astronaut Tracy Dyson, who had been stationed there for six months. Kononenko grinned broadly and offered a double thumbs up as it.
